As the bus drove south to the border, Diego thought of his daughter, who was turning four years old that day.

“My wife bought some gifts to give her from me, so that she does not forget that she has a dad,” Diego told a Human Rights Watch researcher at a deportee reception center in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, the day after he arrived.

As Ricky told his story nearly two weeks later, his face, neck, and arms were still covered with bee-sting welts. “I guess I’m lucky to be alive and out of prison,” he said. on August 28, guards at the federal immigration detention center in Cleburne, Texas, woke 24-year-old “Diego R,” and loaded him onto a bus full of Mexican migrants.

They all sat with their wrists and ankles chained together.

The crackdown is also sweeping in immigrants who are legal residents but who have been convicted of sometimes only minor or old criminal offenses.

Many of these deportations threaten a range of fundamental human rights including the right to family unity, the right to seek asylum from persecution, the right to humane treatment in detention, the right to due process, and the rights of children.

The bus reached the border at noon and the migrants were left to cross the Rio Grande on a footbridge into Mexico, a country Diego had not seen since he was three years old.

Diego’s parents had taken him and his sister, then seven years old, to the United States legally, with a visa that eventually expired.

The deportees waded the Rio Grande by moonlight with the gangsters’ guns at their backs, he said, dodged border patrol cars and helicopters in a forest for hours, moving from abandoned house to abandoned house, where other groups of captive migrants waited.The Trump administration has dramatically ramped up immigration arrests inside the US while it scapegoats millions of people by painting them as violent criminals who should be deported.The administration claims it is focusing on serious, violent criminals, but President Trump’s new policies make every unauthorized immigrant a target, regardless of their actual criminal histories.Diego attended school in Lewisville, Texas, but dropped out in 7th grade.He started working as a painter, making about US0 a week – on good weeks.

One man began screaming, and Ricky found him covered in a thick layer of angry bees that detached themselves and swarmed Ricky.